Will a heat pump pay off in Tacoma, WA?
This one's marginal in Tacoma: it only clears if you stay long enough. $3,500 is what Tacoma would pay extra to go electric rather than replace the furnace and AC with the same again, once the $2,000 federal credit is applied. Lower bills claw that back: about $252 saved annually, for a payback of roughly 13.9 years. Whether that's worth it in Tacoma depends on how many years you expect to own the place.
Why Tacoma's climate drives this number
3501 heating degree days pile up here every year, so Tacoma has a real but manageable winter; the cooling side runs to 58 cooling degree days, where summers rarely ask much of an air conditioner. 21.2°F is the figure equipment gets sized against here — the 99th-percentile cold snap, not an average day — with a record low of 16.7°F on file. Worked through the model, that's a seasonal COP of 3.21 on the cold-climate unit fit for this climate. A cold-climate unit is the right call in Tacoma — below 25°F design temperature, a standard heat pump leans hard on electric-resistance backup, which erases most of the savings. Source: NOAA station TACOMA MET, 2.6 miles from Tacoma — the closest one on record.
The month-to-month numbers for Tacoma
Modelled on a typical 2000-square-foot house, the heat pump draws about 2,762 kWh a year to keep it warm, plus cooling, for a combined electric bill near $401 a year. The gas furnace it replaces burns roughly 36 Mcf a year at 17.62 per Mcf here, for a running cost near $653 a year (electricity here runs 14.27¢/kWh). Buy it outright, not incrementally, and payback stretches to 53.6 years; over 15 years the net position sits $280 ahead.
If your home heats with electric baseboard instead of gas
Plenty of homes in Tacoma heat with electricity alone, no gas line involved. Swap the comparison to resistance heat instead of gas, and Tacoma's answer improves. Switching saves about $875 a year here — a heat pump moving heat rather than generating it needs far less electricity than resistance coils — so the extra $8,000 spent up front comes back in about 9.1 years.
Where Tacoma ranks in this dataset
Tacoma lands at position 1769 out of 3206 cities on heating severity (coldest is 1), and 104 out of 3206 by population size (biggest is 1). That's the middle third for winter severity among the cities covered here.
Deciding what's next in Tacoma, WA
About 228,202 people live in Tacoma, Washington, and every number on this page is what a contractor would actually work from when quoting a system here — the point isn't to replace that quote, it's to tell you whether to bother asking for one. Here, there's no cost penalty to waiting until your current furnace or AC actually needs replacing.
Ask a local HVAC contractor for a quote before committing either way.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide walks through exactly how Tacoma's 3.21 seasonal COP and the rest of this page's numbers get built. Tacoma's 21.2°F design temperature falls on the cold side of the 25°F cutoff the cold-climate unit guide walks through.